ONE minute, it's a quiet street down by the Brisbane River, the next, it's Hollywood.

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "They would link television or films with the internet. They would value-add to shows by giving fans more details about characters and plotlines on websites, give those web fans tantalising clues and allow them to feel as if they inhabited the world of their favourite characters. With the advent of texting, they'd send updates, even messages from a character or two. They'd create online games that enabled fans to get in on the action. They would embrace technology, bundle it up with old-fashioned ideas such as characterisation and strong storylines, and create something new."

Earlier this week, Google announced ARCore, a software-based solution for making more Android devices AR-capable without the need for depth sensors and extra cameras. It will even work on the Google Pixel, Galaxy S8, and several other devices very soon and supports Java, Unity, and Unreal from day one.

Gary Hayes's insight:

quote "“There’s a lot of things that need to happen to make it successful though,” Bavor admits. “We’ve always known that it’s got to work at scale, so we’ve been investing in software-only solutions like ARCore, building on all of the Tango technology, just without the additional sensors. We feel that the technology is ready and we’ve figured out some of the core use cases for AR that we’re really excited about, so that’s why we’re so excited to get ARCore out there and start lighting up across the ecosystem.”"

Sorry, film nerds: Naughty Dog, a video game company, is putting out the most exciting stories on the market.

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "The characters are brought to life by the performances of real-life actors, filmed on camera, working together on sound stages in motion-capture suits. While this practice may seem like a no-brainer for video game companies, Naughty Dog truly pioneered the method of capturing performances for the original Uncharted. The company realized that splitting up the actors so that both ended up doing separate voice over work only results in stale, unemotional characters with which no player can empathize."

Apple's ARKit draws interest in the mundane—fitting furniture in a room, a digital tape measure.

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "So maybe in the end AR will look something like what its most ambitious advocates predict: stuck to our faces, always on, providing a lens into a world we can scarcely imagine. But if we ever get there, it won’t begin with grand visions and jaw-dropping demos. Progress will happen bit by bit, piece by piece, one problem at a time. You’ll be able to measure it in inches."

The more I see, the more I found that virtual reality needs to be more relevant to this generation, but this is what actually happened today.

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "We live in an era that everything is simple, easy, and affordable. You don’t need to go to the library anymore to find an information, a smartphone at the tip of your fingertips will do. Say goodbye to the traffic, you’re able to buy things from your smartphone. You don’t need to stand up and go to the TV room because your smartphone can give you unlimited movies to watch anywhere and anytime. This “laziness” leads to the habit of our generation. So, I’m trying to imagine our generation purchase a high-end VR headset with its expensive price and handle the installation. And, it contradicts with our current “mainstream” habit. People want something simple, easy, and affordable. A high-end VR headset hasn’t reached that standard yet."

Earlier this year at WWDC, Apple showed off an augmented reality demo that used an iPad to recreate the famous Dejarik holochess game from Star Wars. It turns out that was more than just

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "The product uses two pieces to work its magic. The first is a new augmented reality headset, made in conjunction with Lenovo. The device then pairs with a user’s smartphone to do the rest of the heavy lifting. A number of different applications were teased, including the holochess game — which put the animated, holographic monsters on top of a table or other surface — as well as a battle where tiny augmented reality Rebel cartoon characters faced off against an AT-AT."

The Art & Business of Making Games. Video game industry news, developer blogs, and features delivered daily

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote ""Right now at Oats we are working on a 12 minute 'film' that is done entirely within UNITY as a real time renderer. We are essentially doing a cinematic film in a very high end video game engine. this will be rendered out in traditional youtube film fashion, and views will watch like normal," Blomkamp wrote. "BUT because it's ENTIRELY real time, like a game cinematic we have the ability to place a viewer IN the film with Vive, or VR headset and experience it in true real immersive 3d. (not 360 deg global camera, with footage mapped onto the inside of a sphere, which makes me want to kill myself.)""

During my recent trip to Turin I had the opportunity to visit the National Museum of Cinema, which was an amazing surprise: the museum is really interesting and rich in important pieces and in the…

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "At the same time, the high cost of new VR viewers and the ever more powerful smartphone production enable Google to create Google Cardboard viewers to enable more people to enjoy VR’s low cost using their smartphone while Samsung and Oculus produce Gear VR, a viewer that interfaces with Samsung’s high end smartphones and is halfway between Google Cardboard and Oculus Rift. Apparently, this time Virtual Reality is finally floating to success! But is it so…? Not really… according to Crunchbase, the first quarter of 2017 recorded the lowest historic investment in the VR market from the beginning of 2016 to today."

Apple has often been accused of acting like it invented things that others have been doing for years. That complaint is not without merit, however Apple can lay claim to transformin

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "Considering how little time it took to develop two convincingly accurate AR measuring apps with the iOS 11 beta, and reading the comments from their makers, Apple also appears to have an advantage in the ease of development with ARKit. It's exciting to think that there are still three months before the release of the next iPhone and the accompanying finalization of iOS 11, by which time Apple's big-budget app developer partners are likely to have a deluge of AR-enabled apps for people to play with. That's how stuff goes mainstream: as a big wave of change that touches everyone from casual Pokémon Go players to serious home DIY geeks figuring out how to arrange their living room furniture."

YouTube is showing off a brand new file format for creators who want to check out VR but are intimidated by taking the full plunge with all the crazy hardware..

Gary Hayes's insight:

quote "In a recent blog post, Google talked about how 75 percent of 360-degree video users only look at the quadrant in front of them when the video starts. Part of that is a testament to people not being in swivel chairs. The other part is that creators still really don’t know what to do with 360-degree cameras, as the format is largely unexplored despite all the noise surrounding it."

Virtual reality can enhance digital media -- though perhaps not for a few more years.

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "I am of the opinion that virtual reality is the future, just not necessarily in its current form. As with all new significant innovations, it can take time for mass product-market fit to occur and at the point it does, adoption occurs at a rapid pace. The potential for fully immersive ad experiences is exciting but will require significant consideration for user experience and quality of ads. - Fehzan Ali, Adscend Media"

Alejandro González Iñárritu's VR project is groundbreaking, moving, and a must see. Just don't call it a movie.

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "The six-and-a-half minute VR piece is only part of the display that will be mounted (on a grander and more elegant scale) first in June at the Prada Foundation in Milan and then in July at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, followed by other museums around the world. “If people come here with idea to see a short film, it’s wrong,” he said. “It’s like taking two hours to go to the Biennale in Venice. That’s how you have to see it, to experience it as a human being and not criticize the plot. Everything I want to say is here. No applause. No more two-hour rhetoric or political speeches.”"

You start by picking up the knife, or reaching for the neck of a broken-off bottle. Then comes the lunge and wrestle, the physical strain as your victim fights back, the desire to overpower him. You feel the density of his body against yours, the warmth of his blood. Now the victim is lookin

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "But this new form of entertainment is dangerous. The impact of immersive virtual violence must be questioned, studied, and controlled. Before it becomes possible to realistically simulate the experience of killing someone, murder in VR should be made illegal. This is not the argument of a killjoy. As someone who has worked in film and television for almost 20 years, I am acutely aware that the craft of filmmaking is all about maximising the impact on the audience. Directors ask actors to change the intonation of a single word while editors sweat over a film cut down to fractions of a second, all in pursuit of the right mood and atmosphere."

At this year’s E3 -- aka the biggest date in the gaming industry calendar -- there was an Oculus-shaped rift where the Oculus-shaped Rift should have been..

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "Frankly, if the tech can’t be playful it just won’t be functional. But of course, as it stands, VR hardware isn’t anywhere near engineering such slickly futuristic and socially acceptable feats. Nor have we glimpsed, IRL, Magic Leap’s much hyped, years-in-the-making apparently-reality-bending goggles. But even setting these most moonshot-y visions aside, the reality of current VR hardware and software isn’t even meeting rougher-and-readier early adopter expectations. And that’s a big failure."

Quote "While work is clearly being done on the underlying technology for Facebook’s smart glasses now, don’t expect to see the device anytime soon. Michael Abrash, the chief scientist of Oculus, recently said that AR glasses won’t start replacing smartphones until as early as 2022. “20 or 30 years from now, I predict that instead of carrying stylish smartphones everywhere, we’ll wear stylish glasses,” he said at Facebook’s developer conference earlier this year. “Those glasses will offer VR, AR and everything in between, and we’ll use them all day.”"

Today Neurable is offering a first look at a product that is without precedent in modern tech: a brain-computer interface for virtual reality.

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "The benefits of a BCI in mixed reality are many and unique. BCIs analyze patterns of brain activity to determine user intent. This tech is already capable of typing on virtual keyboards and controlling prosthetic limbs, entirely from brain activity. Such intent-driven interactions hold tremendous promise for mixed reality environments, where current problems with user interaction constitute a significant barrier to more widespread adoption. The best solution is a brain-computer interface that allows users to scroll menus, select items, launch applications, manipulate objects, and even input text using only their brain activity. Imagine the productivity revolution that a high-performance, non-invasive, intuitive BCI would unleash in mixed reality."

Quote "This is a big deal. Current VR headsets are pretty bulky and most have to run tethered to a PC because they require so much computing grunt. Anything that reduces that load is a major step forward. And anything that leads to smaller VR headsets will probably help encourage people to buy them. SensoMotoric’s tech is also potentially huge for mobile VR. Foveated rendering should mean running virtual reality apps on your phone won’t kill the battery life. That’s currently a big drawback in mobile virtual reality — poor quality graphics that use a lot of processing power."

Quote "The idea of man/machine fusion is a terrifying one, with science fiction writers, technologists, and philosophers alike having very good cause to ask what even makes us human in the first place. At the same time, the idea is so new that nobody really knows what this world would look like in practice. So if and when the smartphone dies, it will actually be the end of an era in more ways than one. It will be the end of machines that we carry with us passively and the beginning of something that bridges our bodies straight into the ebb and flow of digital information. It’s going to get weird. And yet, lots of technologists already say that smartphones give us superpowers with access to knowledge, wisdom, and abilities beyond anything nature gave us. In some ways, augmenting the human mind would be the ultimate superpower. Then again, maybe I’m just an optimist"

To make VR mainstream, we need something more relatable to our generation. So, in this post, we curated 18 VR idea that commercially work in education.

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "Within three years, virtual reality (VR) is forecast to reach almost $5 billion. A report from the U.S. Department of Labor estimated that up to 65% of today’s primary school students will work in fields that don’t currently exist. It’s very likely that VR will fill the majority of the “fields that don’t currently exist”. No wonder, VR is the first technology ever that will turn any classroom into a virtual world, in which students can explore deeper and get emotionally excited about the topic they’re learning, making it possible to do a virtual field trip every day."

Quote "LG, YI and Lenovo are developing cameras as part of this effort, and they will be compatible with VR180 with comparable prices to standard point-and-shoot cameras. The first of these products is supposed to be available this winter, according to The Verge. This equipment could be used to live stream, and its videos can also be edited on commonly used programs such as Adobe Premiere Pro. Currently, some YouTube videos featuring things such as musical numbers, sports events and landscape shots can be viewed in VR360. But 432,000 hours’ worth of videos are posted on the platform every day, and the goal is to ensure that more and more of that content is VR180-based."

Quote "It means you can view the action anywhere with an internet connection, as though you were actually there. The NBA, the big US basketball league, already screens live regular-season games through the technology to an international audience and the NFL, the big US gridiron competition, has a dedicated NewVR channel for replays."

Soon, the only reason to step inside an Ikea store could be the meatballs. The at times wacky Swedish furniture retailer announced the introduction of its new online virtual reality store in Australia yesterday, which will allow customers to don their VR goggles and take a virtual walk through an Ikea store. Customers in regional …

Gary Hayes's insight:

Quote "Customers in regional areas that have access to the store’s recently rolled-out online shopping offerings can make purchases through the VR application and have them delivered, while inner-city shoppers can organise a click and collect. While the technology works best with VR goggles, the retailer has also created a basic, non-VR offering to allow users to browse the store from a desktop computer, operating much like Google StreetView. The company claims the approach is a first for a large-format retailer in Australia. However, Myer also dabbled in VR last year, creating a virtual department store for customers who were unable to get into a bricks and mortar location."

Quote "We go upstairs, and I take in the view. From planes descending to SFO, and even from drones that buzz the building from a hundred feet above it, the Ring looks like an ominous icon, an expression of corporate power, and a what-the-fuck oddity among the malls, highways, and more mundane office parks of suburban Silicon Valley. But peering out the windows and onto the vast hilly expanse of the courtyard, all of that peels away. It feels … peaceful, even amid the clatter and rumble of construction. It turns out that when you turn a skyscraper on its side, all of its bullying power dissipates into a humble serenity."

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.